IDEAS & TRENDS; Time to Come Home, Zhivago

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

Published: February 12, 2006

OF course, certain things would turn out differently when the Russians put their own version of ''Doctor Zhivago'' on film, but did the balalaika have to go?

The folk instrument that provided a leitmotif of David Lean's 1965 film was all wrong, as most Russians would have -- and still will -- tell you. ''From the point of view of the class that is shown in the movie, the balalaika has about as much to do with them as the saxophone,'' explained Aleksandr Proshkin, the director, who intends to set the record straight in the first Russian adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel.

And so there goes ''Lara's Theme,'' the haunting overture composed by Maurice Jarre for the 1965 film.

Not to mention that Siberian farmhouse with cupolas (which anyone remotely familiar with Russia could have told you was ridiculous), Lara's blond hair (she's a brunette in the book, a redhead in Mr. Proshkin's film), and much of the rest of Hollywood's beloved and utterly improbable wide-screen melodrama of revolutionary Russia.

The new version is part of a cinematic counterrevolution under way in today's Russia, largely waged on television, where a proliferation of lavish serials are reclaiming some of the greatest works of Russian -- and dissident Soviet -- literature.

''Please understand, I have great respect for David Lean's film,'' Mr. Proshkin said in an interview at the Mosfilm Studios, where he recently completed work on his 11-part, 8-hour ''Doctor Zhivago,'' scheduled for broadcast in May on the NTV channel. ''But it is of its time. And it is American.''

Like Mr. Proshkin, many of those involved in the wave of new films profess to have a superior understanding of the elusive Russian soul than those in the West -- Hollywood worst of all -- who have long plumbed the immense depth of Russian literature for cinematic inspiration.

''These films had one shortcoming,'' said Ruben Dishdishyan, producer of the newest ''Doctor Zhivago.'' ''It is as if I decided to make a film of Salinger or Updike or Dreiser.''

In the last two months alone, overwhelming numbers of Russians have tuned in to three television adaptations of Russian classics. In late December, nearly half of all the country's TV viewers watched Mikhail Bulgakov's ''Master and Margarita.'' In late January and early this month, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's screenplay of ''The First Circle,'' his novel set in a labor camp under Stalin, went head to head with another Soviet-era classic, ''The Golden Calf,'' the satire by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov.

All shared two things. They were either banned or heavily censored by the Soviet Union as ideologically incorrect. And the unintended consequence in those years was to leave any adaptation of them to directors in the West.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn's wife, Natalya, in an interview with Izvestia, noted that two other versions of ''The First Circle'' -- in 1972 by Aleksandr Ford, a Pole who had emigrated to Israel and filmed the novel in Denmark, and by the French-Canadian Sheldon Larry in 1991 -- fell short of what Russians have now managed.

''They have breathed this air,'' she said of the latest adaptors of her husband's novel. ''And if not they themselves, then their parents have. It is our common recent history.''

Russian directors, screenwriters and actors have long wanted to reclaim their literary history from the confections created abroad. ''If it is possible to make a film about Russia that would have nothing in common with Russia, or with the revolution, or with our passion, it is 'Doctor Zhivago,' '' a director, Ivan Dykhovychny, wrote in Izvestia last year when the 1965 film appeared on television, at 2:45 in the morning.

Counting a two-part British miniseries in 2002, the new film will be the third ''Dr. Zhivago.'' But this one was filmed entirely in Russia, with the real Russian winter as a prop, not Mr. Lean's pallid recreation, filmed in central Spain.

In place of Omar Sharif as Yuri Zhivago, the poet-doctor, is Oleg Menshikov, one of Russia's most popular actors, who also starred in ''The Golden Calf.'' In an interview, he called the Lean version ''a bit funny,'' but admitted humming ''Lara's Theme'' throughout the recent filming.

Lara is played by Chulpan Khamatova and might, arguably, be considered even more beautiful than Julie Christie's Lara, but that's beside the point. Mr. Proshkin said that David Lean sought an idealized Slavic beauty for Lara and thus missed an essential point: in Pasternak's book, she has a Belgian father and French mother, making her an exotic in her own land.

''This is a nuance that you can see only from within,'' he said. ''That's why Lara's beauty is not a fair Russian beauty. She's a European free person, absolutely free, with no Russian complexes.''

Coming soon to Russian televisions: ''War and Peace,'' done repeatedly abroad, by the director Sergei Solovyov, and ''The Brothers Karamazov'' by Aleksandr Kot, supplanting the 1958 version with Yul Brynner (who was, at least, born in Russia).

''It turned out you could have 30 million people sitting -- you can say, reading -- the same book at the same time,'' said Boris N. Pasternak, a publisher in Moscow who is no relation to the author of ''Doctor Zhivago.'' ''It is very helpful that television has begun to use this form, rather than showing all those soap operas, Mexican serials or that American show, 'E.R.' ''